Many many years ago when I started a blog I had to give it a title. I called it “Aharoni, Ya Mama”, which didn’t mean much. The name “Ya Mama” randomly came from a Fatboy Slim song; I just heard it a short time before I created the blog. Back then Unicode encoding was not so common for websites, and I could select the encoding manually. People complained that they cannot read it—browsers were not as good at identifying the encoding. So I added “in Unicode” into the title. And then in 2017 I decided to grow up and removed the “Ya Mama” part from the title. Sorry if it makes me boring.

What are those things that you sometimes write in parentheses after links?

nonstandard : This means that the target site may not work well in some browsers due to its faulty support of Web standards as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It often happens because the site was programmed in a way that would make it work correctly in Microsoft Internet Explorer, which is very popular, but employs non-standard technologies. These sites are partly or completely unusable to people who don’t use Microsoft Windows. I do my best to avoid using non-standard websites and linking to them, but sometimes there’s a reason to put a link to them here. (Technical note: If i do link to them, i mark those links as rel="nofollow", so they won’t get any credit when search engines rank websites in search results.)

Flash : This means that it is essential to have a working installation of a Flash player to view the target site. First of all the stable Flash player from Adobe is not Free Software. There is a Free alternative called Gnash; it works with some movies, but not all. Flash player is usually installed on computers with Windows, but it may not work well on other platforms. From my experience, Flash can also make some computers crash. Furthermore, some people dislike Flash animations even if they do have Flash installed.

I made a spelling mistake in a comment that i wrote. Can i fix it?

Of course! It’s no problem at all—write me a comment or an email and i shall fix it as soon as possible. Either state specifically what would you like to fix or tell me that you count me on me to be the editor.

You make a lot of spelling and grammar mistakes! And you call yourself a linguist?? Stop pretending like you know English well!

Some mistakes are intentional, some are not. You are welcome to contact me about it and i shall gladly fix the latter. But see the next couple of questions …

Why do you write ‘i’ with a small letter?

Because i think that i deserve a capital letter no more than you do.

Tapestrie is spelled with a y!

My -ie spelling is an in-joke, and it is an intentional mix of French and English.

If you’re into tapestries, i strongly recommend Musée national du Moyen Age. If you go to only one museum in Paris, forget about Louvre and go to that one.